Archive for the ‘xenophobia/nationalism/isolationism’ Category
Posted by Christopher Coen on May 24, 2012
After weeks of intensified incitement of the public against African asylum seekers by top Israeli right-wing and central right-wing government officials, mobs have now begun attacking the asylum seekers in the streets of Tel Aviv. Yesterday a mob attacked asylum seekers’ businesses and homes, threw stones at houses, broke windows of shops and houses, attacked random black people on the streets, looted two stores, and attacked a car packed with Africans, threatening the passengers and shattering the car’s windows. Police arrested seventeen people, but the attacks went on for hours. In an article in +972mag a journalist and political activist explains how the mob also besieged him, another journalist and a photographer:
It started out as a fairly quiet demonstration – or demonstrations, to be precise. One small demonstration took place in Shapira, my neighborhood, where several weeks ago an Israeli young man threw Molotov cocktails into asylum seekers’ homes. The dominant discourse here was, as is typical of the neighborhood, more moderate, and focused on blaming the government (and not the asylum seekers) for local hardships in south Tel Aviv.
…It all started with one woman who came at me out of nowhere, and started screaming: “You throw stones at soldiers! Shame on you! Get the hell out of here!” I tried to say that I have never thrown stones at anybody in my life, but she was not exactly in the mood for dialogue. “You lie! I see you every week on television throwing stones at soldiers and calling them Nazis!”
From this point on everything happened extremely fast. The one woman turned into two, then a group of ten people, which kept on growing. I tried to explain that this was a misunderstanding, that I never attacked any soldier, that I am a resident of Shapira and a journalist covering the protest. But I was talking to myself. Nobody was listening…
…I knew no one would come to my aid. Faced with the angry mob and seeing more people coming from behind me and looking for action – I chose flight…
…I was walking back towards my part of town when I heard a massive cry, looked back, and was horrified to see the mass – about 1,000 people strong – racing forward in my direction, screaming “Sudanese to Sudan!”…
…A car packed with Africans was caught in the crowd, its windows shattered, its riders threatened and saved by police. Seeing this from afar I decided it was time to go home, but reports kept flowing in: the mob turned back into Hatikva and attacked asylum seekers’ businesses and homes, looted at least one store, and attacked random black people on the streets. Seventeen were arrested, but the attacks went on for hours. An Activestills photographer present on the scene later told me that the pictures he took tell only a small portion of the story. He was threatened not to take pictures of looters, and saw so many stones thrown at houses and people beaten (mostly quite lightly) on the streets – that he couldn’t possibly take pictures of it all.
Morning is now up, broken windows of shops and houses need mending, and the peace is somewhat restored. At the end of the day, we must remember that most of the people in our southern neighborhoods largely live together in peace. Many try to bridge gaps and find solutions. Many on both sides know that their enemy is not the asylum seekers or the local Israeli population but the government – which is both creating this impossibly flammable situation and throwing burning matches into it. But this is not the end of the story. It is only the beginning. Read more here
More media articles: Independent journalist and editor Noam Sheizaf explains the poverty underlying the Tel Aviv neighborhoods where politicians are trying to whip up and inflame populist hysteria before elections within year or so.
Jerusalem-based journalist and writer Mya Guarnieri explains the connection between profits and anti-African incitement. The Interior Ministry, whose head has been a ringleader in the incitement, has been busy taking fees from tens of thousands of migrant workers for work permits, while denying African asylum seekers the ability to work. This, while in 2010 the government embarked on a campaign against asylum seekers, including advertisements in which actors claimed that foreigners had taken their jobs.
Posted in right-wing, xenophobia/nationalism/isolationism | Tagged: Africans, asylum, asylum-seekers, israel, mob, refugees, right-wing, Tel Aviv | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Christopher Coen on May 21, 2012
Following dire warnings from Israeli government leaders and intense media reporting of rising crime in the south Tel Aviv neighborhood of Shapira, supposedly caused by African asylum-seekers, a journalist set out on a walk through the neighborhood to see for herself the disruption caused by the asylum-seeking so-called “infiltrators”. Yet, she finds the streets strangely calm, the parks clean, and people going about their daily business. Her article is at Haaretz:
A few weeks ago, in a fit of hatred, someone, or some more than one, threw Molotov cocktails at a kindergarten and apartments used by foreign workers in south Tel Aviv’s Shapira neighborhood, “causing significant property damage but no injuries or loss of life,” in journalese.
This week I took a walk in Shapira. It was Wednesday, the day after the demonstrators returned – some protesting government policy on labor migrants, others against the migrants themselves and still others expressing solidarity with them and denouncing racism…
…I am no stranger to Shapira, having visited it on a few occasions to walk around, to check out housing options, to visit friends, but this was the first time I came to see “the other.”…
…The parks are clean. The main park, built after a battle by residents, on the site of a transformer station, is enviable – well-maintained lawns, a beautiful, shaded wood, the latest sports and playground equipment.
“Well, the city makes sure to keep it clean because of the situation, that’s why it’s clean,” a… neighborhood activist says. We’ll call him B.
The park is calm this afternoon, and no one is sleeping on the slide – “You come with your kid and oops, someone’s sleeping there,” says B. It happens in central Tel Aviv, too.
An African woman, smiling and nicely dressed, pushes three sweet, cared-for children. The baby, adorable in a white dress, laughs at her siblings…
…I get on my bike to look for the things that N. and B. mentioned: people living in the street, cooking in the street, urinating and defecating in the street and in parks; people gathering in large groups; people drinking.
I believe N. and B., but I can’t find evidence of such behavior. The neighborhood seems empty, sleepy… Read more here
Yet Israeli government officials and the police claim that the African asylum-seekers account for 40 percent of Tel Aviv’s crimes. Really? According to another article at +972mag police crime data shows that the crime rate among foreigners in Israel stood at 2.04 percent in 2010, compared with 4.99 percent among Israelis:
Several Sudanese and Eritrean nationals were recently arrested in two separate cases involving the rape of Israeli women and the murder of an Eritrean woman. The media extensively covered these horrible crimes, followed by a long line of politicians quoting frightening police claims that Africans account for 40 percent of Tel Aviv’s crimes. Those politicians are led by Interior Minister Eli Yishai, who dared to say in an interview this week that most “African infiltrators are criminals.”
The press similarly reported in early May that “asylum seekers are involved in 40 percent of crimes,” relying on police figures recently presented to the government. This statistic is shocking, but not as shocking as the fact that senior Israel Police officers are willing to tell lies in an effort to gain a chunk of the huge budget that the government has allotted to the war against African refugees.
Real police data, presented in a meeting held by the Knesset Committee on Foreign Workers on March 19, indicate that the crime rate among foreigners in Israel stood at 2.24 percent in 2011 (1,223 criminal cases out of a total of 54,497 foreigners)…
The 2011 data on Israeli crime has not yet been published, but according to police data reported to the Knesset, the crime rate among the general population in Israel stood at 4.99 percent in 2010. This figure demonstrates that the general crime rate in Israel is more than double that of Africans in Israel… Read more here
Posted in police, right-wing, xenophobia/nationalism/isolationism | Tagged: asylees, asylum-seekers, israel, migrants, refugees, resettlement, Shapira | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Christopher Coen on May 6, 2012
There has now been a second series of firebombings in the Shapira neighborhood in south Tel-Aviv. Last week there was a series of three Molotov-cocktail firebombings of African migrants in the same neighborhood. In recent months the conservative led Israeli government has attempted to incite fear and hostility toward the African migrants. An article in Haaretz has more:
Two firebombs were hurled on Saturday night at a house in south Tel Aviv. No injuries were reported, but police are investigating whether the incident is connected to a similar attack a week and a half ago that targeted African residents…
…Tension between the long-standing Israeli residents of south Tel Aviv and the foreign refugees, asylum seekers and labor migrants now living alongside them, is not new. According to the Interior Ministry’s population registry, in 2011 more than 17,000 unauthorized foreign nationals – mostly from Sudan and Eritrea – sneaked into Israel through the border with Egypt. After their identities are checked at Ketziot Detention Center, most are bused to the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station area, in the south of the city.
City officials estimate that around 40,000 labor migrants and more than 20,000 asylum seekers live in south Tel Aviv. Most live in the disadvantaged Shapira, Hatikva, Neve Sha’anan and Kiryat Shalom neighborhoods, as well as the area surrounding the bus station. Read more here
Posted in asylees, xenophobia/nationalism/isolationism | Tagged: Africans, asylees, firebombing, israel, migrants, Molotov cocktail, refugees, resettlement, Shapira, Tel Aviv | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Christopher Coen on April 27, 2012
Refugees who show and attempt to openly talk about personal problems can find others who wish to hijack the discussion for their own ulterior motives. An article from Australia highlights the same phenomena we see in the US. The article is at WAtoday, an online publication in Western Australia:
WHEN a Muslim man beats his wife why does the broader community focus on his religion rather than on the crime?
The question of culture, religion and violence was at the heart of the discussion when the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women, Rashida Manjoo, met representatives of migrant and refugee women’s groups…last week.
“As soon as we use a preface like Muslim or Afghan, suddenly the issue becomes about culture, not domestic violence,” said Judy Saba, a psychologist…
Ms Manjoo, a South African who has spent the past three years investigating the dark world of domestic and state violence against women, is on an informal study tour of Australia…
She is here to listen – and what she heard from the dozen women representing mainly Muslim, African and Asian women’s groups was of the struggle to deal with issues such as domestic violence without impugning their communities.
Joumanah El Matrah, from the Australian Muslim Women’s Centre for Human Rights, said when groups tried to draw the government’s attention to violence against minority women the discussion was hijacked by those in the wider public who focused on “Muslim” violence.
“We are in a bind because the community is vilified,” she said. “Putting the issue in the public space feeds into the stereotype of Muslim men beating their wives…
…Ms Manjoo said pathologising a religion or culture created the illusion that a problem like domestic violence did not exist in the dominant culture, but was about “the other”… Read more here
Posted in Australian refugee resettlement prgm, religion, UN, xenophobia/nationalism/isolationism | Tagged: culture, domestic abuse, domestic violence, refugees, religion, resettlement | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Christopher Coen on February 24, 2012
Over the past several weeks has came news that Israel will deport southern Sudanese refugees to South Sudan, claiming that their safety is now ensured by the South’s declaration of independence last summer — even though the fledgling country is far from safe or stable for these refugees (see Haaretz article). What sense this makes escapes me since the southern Sudanese are natural allies of Israel, having experienced large-scale murderous attacks by the Islamist government of Sudan. At the same time, Israel is also ramping up hatred of other African refugees feeling persecution. (Israel has re-branded these refugees as “infiltrators” and “a threat to the fabric of Jewish society” — refusing to accept 1500 people per month, mostly African Muslims, while importing workers for cheap labor from East Asia – primarily the Philippines and Thailand.) When will we hear US refugee agencies speak out against these human rights violations? An article in Aljazeera explains the situation:
…The notion of a “Jewish and democratic state”, never a feasible reality, continues to unravel as its inherent racism is revealed in a new way. Any political discussion of refugees that are of the wrong ethnicity inevitably refers to African migration to Israel as an “existential threat”. Labelling these refugees as “threats” allows the state to criminalise and imprison them…
…State officials estimate that around 2,000 asylum seekers enter the country every month. Most of the men end up in Levinsky Park in southern Tel Aviv. At any time during the day or night, one can find young black African men sitting on the park’s benches, swings and concrete walls. In late January, a man who lived in the park died from exposure during the night.
The majority of the men who live in Levinsky Park are from Eritrea and Darfur…
…While community members and organisations have responded to the refugee-related crises developing in the country’s founding city by setting up an emergency shelter and serving warm dinners to a hungry crowd, these generous gestures are the exception in a state that fosters growing hostility to outsiders…
…”This is how the public becomes racist,” Yohannes Bayu, the director of African Refugee Development Centre (ARDC), tells me, explaining the government’s campaign against African asylum seekers, who are labelled as “labour infiltrators”…
…the media and the government has ramped up this hatred,” explains Bayu.
But Bayu adds that overt racism in Israeli society has become common, “People are attacked on the streets. People are not allowed to rent houses to African refugees.”…
…The desperate men – and some women – who leave their families and homelands behind in Africa escape torture, forced military conscription and murder. As confirmed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Eritrea and Sudan have been two of the top producers of refugees over the past two years. These states’ betrayals of their own citizens have rendered tens of thousands stateless.
Conventions and detentions
Israeli politicians’ claims that only a “drizzle” of the African immigrants are rightfully refugees is quickly belied by the fact that almost none of the men are deported. Of the approximately 17,000 asylum seekers who reached Israel in 2011 via Egypt, only 270 have been returned to Egypt. Israel is a party to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees…
However, allowing asylum seekers to remain in the country without rights hardly fulfills the directions of the Convention, which was composed in 1951 after the world saw and acknowledged the dangers posed to stateless human beings.
Before reaching Israel’s borders, asylum seekers from Eritrea and Sudan must survive a harrowing journey across the Sinai. They routinely experience rape and enslavement, and are reportedly the targets of organ traffickers.
Whether jumping the fence or walking across the border into Israel, asylum seekers are immediately picked up by border police and taken to a detention centre where they are held for weeks or months. …immigration authorities will begin holding these men to the extent of [a] new law – three years – once [a] new detention centre is built…
…for now the scenario for these men follows a predictable pattern: They are released in less than three months and given a three to six-month visa and then bussed up to Levinsky Park in Tel Aviv, where they are left to fend for themselves… Read more here
Posted in abuse, Eritrean, Jewish, left-wing, NGO's (Non-governmental organizations), safety, Sudanese, UN (United Nations), xenophobia/nationalism/isolationism | Tagged: 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, Darfur, Eritrean, human rights, israel, Levinsky Park, racism, refugees, resettlement, sudanese | 5 Comments »
Posted by Christopher Coen on September 22, 2011
A large painting of General Robert E. Lee hangs inside Bedford County criminal court - the only portrait in the courtroom.
The Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC) recently released a report entitled “The Forgotten Constitution – Racial Profiling and Immigration Enforcement in Bedford County, Tennessee.” The 16-page report about this rural county, about an hour south of Nashville, alleges that immigrants and refugees face hostility and discrimination from all aspects of the criminal justice system – including the Shelbyville police, the sheriff’s department and jail, and the local court system.
Bedford County is exceptional for its large and vibrant immigrant and refugee communities, who live and work in the rolling hills of this rural county about an hour south of Nashville, Tennessee. Somali and Burmese refugees, Egyptian immigrants, and Latino immigrants are the backbone of local industry, working at poultry plants and on the walking horse farms that make Shelbyville – Bedford’s county seat – famous…
…Despite immigrants’ essential economic contributions to Bedford County, they face hostility and discrimination from all aspects of the criminal justice system, which works in close coordination with federal immigration enforcement authorities. Arrests of Latinos have intensified since Tennessee law changed in January 2011 to require jailers to ask arrestees their citizenship and report this information to ICE. Pervasive anti-immigrant sentiment coupled with misinterpretation of the scope of this law has resulted in an ongoing immigration inquisition by local law enforcement that has caused a steep increase in detention and removal by ICE. Suspected immigrants are subjected to racial profiling and increased police surveillance. They are arrested and detained in county jail for minor traffic violations–often unlawfully–in order to facilitate their deportation. Immigrants and refugees are unable to meaningfully access government services and the court system, which means many of them are unable to vindicate their rights. Immigrants are mistreated by ICE officials, who have collaborated with locals engaged in explicitly racially discriminatory practices to entrap, interrogate, and arrest immigrants who clearly do not fit immigration enforcement priorities. Many immigrant victims of crime no longer trust law enforcement to protect them… To be an immigrant or refugee in Bedford County is to be treated with suspicion or outright hostility by one’s own government, whose offices still exhibit vestiges of the overt racial apartheid of years past…
…Immigrants are targeted at disproportionate rates by officers of Bedford County law enforcement agencies, particularly the Shelbyville Police Department, as a pretext for making arrests that will enable jailers to contact ICE… Local law enforcement agencies’ patrols, traffic stops, and arrests demonstrate a pattern of treating Latinos and other immigrants in a discriminatory manner…
…Immigrants face discrimination in booking and detention procedures at the Bedford County Jail, which is administered by the Bedford County Sheriff’sDepartment and Sheriff Randall Boyce… Immigrants are more likely to be held for long periods of time for minor traffic violations and to be held unlawfully without bond or after posting bond as a “courtesy” for ICE when there is no ICE detainer. Since January 2011, the unlawful practices of the Bedford County Sheriff’s Department have resulted in as much as a tenfold increase in the number of immigrants detained for ICE – all at the expense of Bedford County’s taxpayers. ICE has initiated deportation proceedings against most of those who have been unlawfully detained…
…A large painting of Confederate General Robert E. Lee hangs above the main doorway just inside the Bedford County criminal court, and is the only portrait in the courtroom. There is little justice here for immigrants who walk through these doors, in the shadow of that disciple of state racism and white supremacy…
…Immigrant criminal defendants assigned to the public defender are often not advised of the immigration consequences of a criminal conviction... Recommendations by defense counsel to plead guilty have jeopardized the ability of some long-standing community members to qualify for cancellation of removal or other immigration relief. Finally, some court-appointed attorneys have apparently charged indigent Latino clients for court appearances, despite the fact that these defendants are charged attorney fees by the probation office for the exact same representation and court appearances… Read more here
Posted in Burma/Myanmar, court, ICE, Murfreesboro/Shelbyville, police, poultry production, secondary migration, refugee, Somali, unwelcoming communities, xenophobia/nationalism/isolationism | Tagged: apartheid, Bedford County, courts, criminal justice system, discrimination, immigrants, Latinos, police, racism, refugees, resettlement, Shelbyville, Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, The Forgotten Constitution, TIRRC | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Christopher Coen on September 19, 2011
Continuing to run amok in this land is the phenomena of people who can only seem to raise themselves up by finding someone else to stand on and scapegoat — someone they think will be an easy victim. Refugees in Concord, New Hampshire just found this out the hard way. An article in the Concord Monitor explains what happened.
Racist, xenophobic graffiti was found Sunday morning on three Concord homes where refugee families live.
Written in a small scrawl across the white siding planks, the graffiti declares with slurs that the city was better before refugees resettled here.
The graffiti refers to the refugees as “subhuman,” among other slurs… Read more here
There is a video report at NECN.
**UPDATE** Sept. 20, 2011 – Concord Monitor.
**REWARD Offered** – for any information leading to an arrest in the case, Sept. 20, 2011 – Concord Monitor.
Posted in Congolese, hate crimes, New Hampshire, safety, xenophobia/nationalism/isolationism | Tagged: concord, graffiti, Hate Crimes, New Hampshire, racism, refugees, resettlement, scapegoat, subhuman, xenophobic | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Christopher Coen on July 28, 2011
After the deadly events in Norway this week, in Oslo and on Utoya Island carried out by right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik, Europeans are taking a new look at threats to society posed by the right-wing. An article in the New York Times has an analysis:
…Nonviolent political parties can hardly be blamed for the violent actions of a terrorist or a homicidal person. But politicians have begun to question inflammatory speech in the debate over immigrants, which has helped fuel the rise of right-leaning politicians across Europe in recent years.
The head of the Social Democratic Party in Germany, Sigmar Gabriel, told the German news service dpa on Wednesday that a trend toward xenophobia and nationalism in the region had fostered the attacks in Norway. In a society where anti-Islamic sentiment and isolation were tolerated “naturally on the margins of society, there will be crazy people who feel legitimized in taking harder measures,” he said.
“The center of society has to make clear that there is no room for this with us, even for sanitized versions,” Mr. Gabriel said. “There is a deep feeling in society that the pendulum has swung too far toward individualism.”…
…Mr. Breivik’s 1,500-page manifesto, while full of calls for violence, also includes some passages that echo the concerns of mainstream political leaders about preserving national identity and values.
“So much of what he wrote could have been said by any right-wing politician,” said Daniel Cohn-Bendit, co-president of the Green bloc in the European Parliament. “A lot of arguments about immigrants and Islamic fundamentalism will now be much easier to question and to push back.”
The clearest evidence of a change in tone at this early stage may be the way anti-immigrant parties try to rein in their members. A member of the National Front, Jacques Coutela, was suspended for calling Mr. Breivik “an icon” on his blog. He replaced it with a note saying that he denounced Mr. Breivik’s actions…
…far-right groups have sought to distance themselves from Mr. Breivik and his actions, and violent acts in general…
Europol, the European Union’s police agency [has] created a task force to investigate threats in Scandinavia and links to extremist groups across Europe… Read more here
Posted in anti-Islamic, police, right-wing, security/terrorism, xenophobia/nationalism/isolationism | Tagged: Anders Behring Breivik, anti-immigrant, anti-Islamic, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Europe, Europol, Green bloc in the European Parliament, immigrants, individualism, isolationism, Jacques Coutela, National Front, nationalism, Norway, Oslo, preserving national identity, right-wing, Scandinavia, Utoya Island, xenophobia | Leave a Comment »
Christopher Coen
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